Remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic and the level of interpersonal competences among nursing students at full-time first-degree studies – preliminary reports

Introduction:
Social competences, broadly defined by Blumberg et al. as “skills and behaviours necessary to get along with others and be liked”, play a huge role in everyday life. It is also important what level of interpersonal competences students of nursing and midwifery have due to their future profession, which requires maintaining constant contact with the patient and proper understanding of their needs in the context of illness and the recovery process in the context of remote learning. The aim of the project was to determine the extent to which remote learning affects the level of interpersonal competences of first-degree nursing studies.

Material and methods:
The pilot study included a group of 62 second-year, first-degree nursing students Collegium Medicum of the Jagiellonian University. The study group was planned to include students who studied remotely in high school during the last 2 years of the pandemic and studied for at least one year. The study was conducted using the Interpersonal Competences Questionnaire ICQ-R by Buhrmester, Wittenberg, Reis, and Furman (1988) in the United States of America. Adaptation into Polish was made in 2015 by Dawidowicz, Klinktosz, and Śliwak from the Department of Social Psychology and Psychology of Religion at the Catholic University of Lublin. The ICQ-R version A self-assessment questionnaire is used to predict the teamwork skills of a given person (employee, student).

Results and Conclusions:
The level of interpersonal competences among first-degree nursing and midwifery students is not high; however, the low number of students surveyed encourages continuation of research in this field. The results are similar when it comes to the level of the examined competences of the surveyed students.